The recent spate of men writing with gender-neutral names seems commercially driven. It is not a necessity for acceptance, as the Brontë sisters or George Eliot felt their pen names to be. However, there are earlier examples of men who wrote as women to give voice to “female” issues at a time when recourse to the females themselves proved elusive or unthinkable. (Paula Cocozza)

Nadia Clifford and Tim Dunlap (Jane Eyre and Rochester in the touring National Theatre production of Jane Eyre) have visited a bookstore in Norwich promoting the performances of Jane Eyre. In Eastern Daily Press:

Nadia Clifford and Tim Delap, who play Jane Eyre and Mr Rochester in the National Theatre and Bristol Old Vic production, visited the Book Hive on Tuesday where they spoke about their experiences of the well known novel.
Ms Clifford said: “I first read Jane Eyre when I was about 14, and straight away I felt such an affinity with Jane, and with so many characters in the novel. And then I read it again at about 21. Obviously I re-read the book when I got the part, and I was reminded of how many emotions I experienced the first time I read it, and how much I identified with it as a teenager.”
Mr Delap said the stage adapation remained very faithful to the book, including all the best bits from the novel and all the key moments in Jane Eyre’s life.
“We’ve just added a huge amount of theatricality to it and we’ve told it in a really exciting, theatrical, visual way,” he said. (Emma Knights)

Why did you want to choose classic thrillers? Do you feel they don’t get enough attention?
I gravitated towards the older classics because I feel that they are the origins of the genre that I’m writing in and not necessarily always recognised as such. I find it interesting to trace the history of this psychological suspense genre. Jane Eyre is one of the first psychological thrillers, though obviously it has lots of other things going on as well, and The Woman in White was the The Girl on the Train of its time.

More Brontë mentions in Austen articles in the press:

Though Austen had her detractors like Charlotte Brontë, Ralph Waldo Emerson and Mark Twain, they were outnumbered by her admirers like Sir Walter Scott, Anthony Trollope, Virginia Woolf, who called her the first truly great female author and the first good English author to have a distinctly feminine writing style, while Rex Stout, the creator of Nero Wolfe and a man who said he previously believed men did everything better, deemed her the greatest English writer ever. (Vikas Datta in India New England News)

Like George Eliot and the Brontës she was a daughter of the manse, living quietly in the country in a succession of picturesque vicarages. Also like Charlotte and Anne she was a governess, being occasionally dragooned to look after her brother Edward’s brood as the poor relation at Godmersham Park. (Wendy Holden in Daily Express)

For example, and just among other female novelists, what of Emily Dickinson’s passionate poetry, the windswept stories of the Brontë sisters, Mary Shelley’s monstrous Frankenstein, or Radcliffe’s gothic gore? Surely these stories were brought forth by more than mere hermits, spinsters or wives with no regular access to pathology labs or the morgue? (Janine Barchas in the Washington Post)

And this is a WTF moment that is almost funny in an absurd kind of way:

With that in mind, think about the lesson at the end of the novel. Emma is turned off by the relationship of Jane Fairfax and Frank Churchill, who have been secretly engaged, a poor woman with few connections and a man of higher social standing (Charlotte Brontë found the treatment of Jane Fairfax so unfair that Jane Eyre began as essentially a fan-fiction). (Leah Rachel Von Essen in Bookriot)

Friends and authors Emma Claire Sweeney and Emily Midorikawa delve into the lives and female friendships of several authors, including Austen, in the forthcoming A Secret Sisterhood. Sweeney and Midorikawa recount how Austen befriended her niece’s governess and amateur playwright, Anne Sharp, and turned to her for manuscript critiques. A perfect gift for both the Janeites and the female friends in your life. (Elizabeth Sile)